Simple Tags – The Ultimate Tag Management Plugin for WordPress

Simple Tags is a WordPress plugin that doesn’t need much of an introduction. Many users are familiar with this plugin because it’s often one of those plugins that you download as soon as you start using WordPress. With all of its features and functionality, it really should be automatically included with every WordPress installation.

Once you accumulate a lot of tags on your blog, you can really appreciate a management tool such as Simple Tags because editing tags for posts and pages on an individual basis can be a real pain. This plugin also helps you with finding the right tags to include in your content, it helps to display tags on your posts and pages with a cloud or organized lists, plus it even helps to optimize your content with internal links to tag pages.

Let’s take a look at everything the Simple Tags WordPress plugin can do.

Simple Tags Menu

Once installed, you’ll find the “Simple Tags” sub-menu located under the Settings menu. This is the first place you’ll want to start after installing the plugin.

Features

The features tab is where you can enable/disable different features of the plugin.

Related posts by term – display related posts for your content based on related terms.

Auto terms posts – automatically add terms to your content by proceeding to a search within the content.

Tags for pages – add tags to your pages and add pages to tags search.

Tag cloud short code – will display a cloud tag, once you add the short code to your blog theme.

Administration

Under the Administration tab, you can customize a few features even further. For instance, you can change the tag input type (for your post) from “input” (single line) to text area (multi-line). You can also choose the minimum amount of characters for the auto-completion feature. If you want auto-complete to work as soon as you start typing a character (tags will be appear below the input area), just leave it at zero.

You can also change the click tags order and enter your API keys for OpenCalais, Alchemy, and Zemanta. Above I mentioned that you can enable a feature that will suggest tags from other services. In order to use the 3 above-mentioned services, you’ll have to enter an API key, which you can create for free at those prospective websites.

Tag Cloud

This sections offers numerous options for customizing your tag cloud, should you choose to enable and use it on your blog. You can customize the tag order, cloud type, link format, colors, and more.

Tags for Current Post

A neat feature that you can enable here, is the ability to display a tags list in your RSS feds. You can also automatically display a tags list on your blog, homepage, single posts, or pages.

There are options here for customizing your tags list as well such as the separator string, text to display before tags list, text to display after tags list, and more.

Meta Keyword & Related Tags

These two features have actually been removed because they weren’t really important, plus there are better plugins for them. There are suggestions here for plugins that you can use to get these features.

Mass Edit Terms & Auto Terms

Under the Tools menu, you’ll find two new sub-menus added by Simple Tags: Mass Edit Terms and Auto Terms.

Mass Edit Terms

Mass Edit terms is a place where you can edit tags and categories for up to 200 posts or pages all at once! You’ll see your post title and then an input area for tags. Your current tags for that post will already be displayed here and you can add, remove, or edit as needed.

Auto Terms

“This feature allows WordPress to look into post content and title for specified terms when saving posts.” If your post content or title contains any keyword that you have in your auto terms list, the plugin will automatically add that keyword as a term for the post.

There are a couple of options here that you can check off, like the ability to auto-tag only posts without terms and the ability to also use your local terms database.

Post Editor Additions

Finally, you’ll notice some additional features in the post editor: suggested tags from, tags (Simple Tags), and click tags. As mentioned above, Suggested tags displays tags from various services in addition to your local database. Tags (Simple Tags) is simply the place to enter your post tags. Click tags display all of your tags to make it easier to add to your post – no typing necessary.

So as you can see, Simple Tags is absolutely a must-have for managing tags, enhancing your content, and quickly adding tags to your posts. Plus, if you use custom taxonomies on your blog, this plugin makes it easy to manage tags and categories for those as well. It may seem a little complicated, but once you get starting using it you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Comments (5)

Vaiko

Yes, posts and also pages have tags attached.
Maybe You know someone, who can help me about this problem?

Thank You.

Kevin Muldoon

says:

July 25, 2012 at 12:00 AM

Hi Vaiko,

I believe I tested this plugin once though I haven’t used it extensively on any website. One thing I have noticed is that the plugin hasn’t been updated since August 2011. It doesn’t look like the plugin developer supports it anymore.

It seems strange that it’s showing the tag cloud but not showing the posts with that particular tag. I assume all of your posts still have tags attached to them?

Kevin

Vaiko

says:

July 25, 2012 at 12:00 AM

Hello

Great post.

I have problems with my website using Simple Tags plugin. It is showing tag cloud, but if i click on the tag on tag cloud it doesnt show me the relevant posts. It show no posts at all.

I have searched on google, but i dont find an exact answer. I think that problem is propably with “tag link format ” maybe?

Kevin Muldoon

says:

April 16, 2012 at 12:00 AM

Do you not use the ‘singleonly’ option? You can see this in an image in my review above.

bruce

says:

April 16, 2012 at 12:00 AM

when placing the tags for ech post…how do you stop them showing up on the main page?
I know that in the settings “tags for current – Automatically display tags list into post content:” I select NO…but the tags keep showing up on my post.
have gone through al theme settings – played around with the plugin settings, but just cant figure it out!!